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Monday, May 5, 2014

The Joy of Prosody: The Joy of Revision

By Liz Mastin

Revision – to see again. The process of
changing something, especially a piece of writing, in order to improve it by
correcting it or including new information or ideas.

Greetings fellow writers. My book of poems
is nearly done! --- or so I thought. For, as it happens, completing a
collection of poems can take a fairly long time, due to working on revisions.
Having laid my poems aside for a time, I now more easily “see” previously
“unseen” mistakes, and I am so glad I still
have time to improve them further, before anchoring them permanently in a book.
In this column, I am consulting articles on revision, written by TonyMorris, author of
award winning book Fugue’s End, and
literary educators RobertGambell and MD Lynn, and prize winning poet SandraSoli.

According to Morris
“The act of revising is probably the most important, and at the same time, the
least utilized tool of beginning and veteran poets alike. Nevertheless, that
second, third, or even fiftieth look
at the poem is at the very heart of becoming a great poet.” He continues: “Poets
as varied as T.S.Elliot,
RobertFrost,
Robert Penn Warren, and MaryOliver are famous for producing
poems through the act of multiple revisions. (Oliver
has said that she usually revises through forty or fifty drafts of a poem
before she begins to feel comfortable
with it).”

“Whether the poem was written with ease,
or whether it was written with much effort, it is usually still an unfinished
piece of work that now needs your most conscious and honest appraisal.” When you revise a poem, it is best to get away
from the poem for awhile. Set it aside and return to it occasionally over the
next few days, few weeks or even longer. Try to approach the poem as though you
were not the writer, but the reader.

Among the many things one should consider
when revising are:

1.Does
the energy of the poem go in the direction the poem wants you to go in? Have you listened to what the poem wants?

2.Do
clichés exist? If so eliminate them. You should be using unique and fresh
language and thoughts.

3.Does
the voice of the poem remain consistent?

4.Does
the tone of the poem remain consistent?

5.Is the poem overly punctuated? “An over abundance of punctuation causes the
poem to be choppy and hard to read in any kind of flow.”

6.Is the poem under punctuated? “Poems with very little or no punctuation
makes it difficult to read and makes the reader have to pause while reading.”

7.Are
all of your words spelled correctly?

8.Does
the poem have cadence if it is free verse or if metered, is the meter
consistent with the pattern determined for the poem?

9.Does your poem tell a story of some kind? According to MD
Lynn, “Poetry is a story told in verse
form. It should have a plot of some sort that we can see. Use irony, metaphors,
analogies – tell us a story and give us a good ending to our short word
journey.”

10.Have
you chosen words for the poem that fit the emotion you want to convey?

11.Have
you remembered to consider “happiness,
humor and fun” as also appropriate
emotions for poems? “Good poetry doesn’t
have to be esoteric and morose.”

12.Does
your poem make a reader feel something?

13.Does the poem make sense? “Esoteric poetry is great, as long as the
reader can get a sense of what you mean or can connect and find a meaning all
their own. A poem that makes no sense and leaves the reader wondering, ‘What
was that all about?’ is truly not good poetry”, according to MD Lynn.

14.Is
your diction striking and fresh, or drab and routine?

15.Have
you used active verbs and have you avoided using the passive voice too
much?

16.Have
you considered using words with assonance, consonance, alliteration and/or
internal rhyming?

17.It
is smart to put strong words at line-endings

18.Make
sure you can justify every adjective and adverb and use active verbs.

21.Have you considered having the reader
follow you but being careful not to be too predictable.
“Don’t spoon feed the reader.”

22.*According to SandraSoli
“Many poems can be improved by rewriting
an obvious, easy ending.”

23.Some
poems need amputation if the poet goes on talking after the poem done.

24.Don’t
be afraid to toss out stanzas that do not add to the meaning of the poem. Also
it is advisable to keep all of your old revisions, just in case you end up
liking an earlier revision better than a later one.

SandraSoli affirms:
“Do not distrust revision.”

Here is a short
ballad (I wrote quite quickly) while feeling inspired. Below is the first version
and it is followed by a revision. I
am not sure, but only hope it is better. I will keep the first version so I can
possibly change it back if I should want to or, I could take the best lines
from each version and create the poem that way.

Have fun revising!

Ballad
of Walt the Wizard

LizMastin

Digging in the
desert dirt,

With his pick
and pan,

Lanky frame,
skin fried brown,

Aureate nugget
in his hand,

He greets all
those who to his claim

Arrive with
varying hope

“How are you? I’m
Walt the Wizard.

I’ll show you
folks the ropes.”

“There’s lots of
gold here I am sure:”

He mentions Greece and Rome.

They watch his
freighted trammel work;

He looks up from
the ground:

“I don’t care if
I should dig

And never find a
thing!

That’s not the
reason, nor only goal,

Just hear those
mountains ring!

“If you’ll stand
and meditate

You’ll soon see
what I see:

Desert’s
grandeur, endless skies –

Gold enough for
me.”

First
Revision

Digging in the
desert sun,

Steel pick in
his hand;

Lanky frame,
skin bronzed brown,

Large nugget in
his pan,

He greets all
those who to the claim

Arrive with varying
hopes:

“How are you?
I’m Walt, the Wizard.

I’ll show you
folks the ropes.

“There’s lots of
gold here. That I know.”

He mentions Greece and Rome.

As they watch
his trommel work

He scans the
hills around:

“Now I don’t
mind if I should dig

Yet never find a
thing.

It’s not only
for gold I search,

Just hear those mountains
sing.

“Stand still now
and meditate,

You’ll soon
glean what I glean:

Desert grandeur,
endless skies,

Gold enough for me.”

Liz Mastin Bio

Liz Mastin is a poet who lives in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho during the summer and Bullhead City, Arizona
in winter. She thrives on the study of the great poets, their biographies, the
schools of poetry to which they adhered, and the poetic conventions of the
times in which they lived.

While she enjoys free verse as well as metrical poetry, her
main interest lies in prosody. She notices that most of the enduring poems are
those we can remember and recite. Liz enjoys poetry forms such as the sonnet,
the sestina, the couplet, blank verse, simple quatrains, etc. and she hopes to
see modern poets regain interest in studied metrical poetry.

Liz is currently putting together her first collection of
poems which should be completed this winter. The poems are a mixture of
metrical and free verse poems.

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